Dungeon Siege 3 will be adding a new piece of downloadable content this October, which will raise the level cap, add a new quest, and bring in a new enchantment system. The "Treasures of the Sun" pack is set to launch for $9.99 on Steam, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live.

The new DLC takes place in the Aronoi desert, in a quest to find a lost Legion hero. Obsidian will be raising the level cap from 30 to 35 for this expansion, along with introducing a new array of abilities and allowing the player to reallocate talent and proficiency points. You'll also be able to enchant your weapons and armors with Vials produced through transmuting items.

New enemies include mummies and giant skeletons, which is more or less what you should expect from the desert. If I were a betting man, I'd wager on scorpions making an appearance too.

The third siege of dungeons arrived a little while back, with Obsidian taking the reins of the Gas-Powered Games-created loot'n'kill fandango. I've been frantically clicking my mouse button at it for the last few days-–an act which I have now transmuted into some words.

First point of interest for me in any dungeon crawler: can I summon animals? Silently beating up monsters in rock corridors gets pretty lonely, after all. Also, I'm really very lazy – if there's some companion animal doing half the damage for me I don't need to press so many number keys. Get to it, my furry friend.

Dungeon Siege III delivers on this front, at least. My stocking-wearing gunwoman can summon a spectral hound to antagonise foes while she snipes them from afar. On top of that, one of the AI-controlled companions (only one of which you can have with you at any one time) can summon a flaming hound. It's doggy carnage out there.

Fightin' hounds are hardly a defining element of Dungeon Siege III, especially as they just vanish after a couple of minutes instead of being a constant companion, but their token-yet-dramatic presence does speak to the conflict at the heart of the game. There's something excessive and ludicrous in there trying to get out, but it's restrained by a formulaic hack'n'slash structure, dour dialogue and rather insipid aesthetics.

‘Formulaic hack'n'slash structure' is a bit of a stupid thing for me to say though, isn't it? Hack and slash is by nature formulaic, and the appeal of these games is less about grand adventures and more about killing and collecting things until your fingers are raw stumps and your eyeballs are blood-hued gooseberries. Dungeon Siege III has that–-this review is later than planned because I kept diving back in for more, under the false pretext of ‘I'd better investigate this element a little more before writing, or maybe there's something important in that side-quest I didn't bother with yet.' I was lying to myself-–the interest in returning was simply the pleasant, self-chosen boredom and fleeting sense of reward that comes from click,click,click,click, die,die,die,die.

Trouble is, I can't think of anything to pick out from Dungeon Siege III and hold aloft as being better than the myriad other killfests in this ever-compulsive sub-genre. It doesn't have Diablo's CGI-bolstered story or escalating sense of doom, it doesn't have Torchlight's gleefully unbridled just-getting-on-with-it… and it doesn't have Dungeon Siege's organic skill levelling or party system. Only the name and the background hum of Ehb lore makes Dungeon Siege III particularly a Dungeon Siege game-–take that away and it could be any old dungeon crawler. And despite being far flashier, in many ways it's a backwards step from the first DS towards something far more simple and over-familiar.

The closest it comes to its own identity is the skill system. As well as a neat and fluid system that has you insta-switching between two distinct trios of skills—in my character's case, one set best for hordes and another for wearing down stronger single foes–-it makes a noble attempt to hide all its numbers, presenting abilities as big, friendly icons you click on when levelling up to make ‘em better. Obviously this is anathema to the cRPG devout, but it lends welcome immediacy-–that power's fun/easy, so make it better with a click then get on back to the action.

It's probably most comparable to console hacky-slashy such as Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, placing an emphasis on powers looking flashy as much as achieving useful things, but there are gentle hints of strategy to it. For instance, stacking together various abilities to whittle down the occasional big, bad bosses that much more quickly, and upgrading them in certain ways (you can put about half a dozen points into each, with each point choosing broadly between either improving its raw power or a bonus effect such as healing you or stunning foes) in order to lean your character slightly more towards more efficient self-healing or more regular critical hits.

Still though: too often the overall experience is as dry as a plywood sandwich. For every power that does something visually over the top (like dog-summoning or turning into a human torch), there are two that just emit a small purple glow and change a number for a few seconds. There are a reasonable number of side-quests (quite a few of which you'll need to do in order to level up enough for the main quests), but they're almost always long, samey kill-treks through more disguised corridors rather an an adventurous diversion in and of themselves. Some of the deathly-dry conversations between missions offer response options, but bar a few that have a poorly-explained positive effect on your companion NPC, it pretty much doesn't matter what words you click on. This is a game about pressing the left mouse button until everything's dead-–it might have been better if it had concentrated on making that element as glossy and varied as possible, instead of cramming in unengaging cutscene filler.

Occasionally though, real character creeps in-–the steampunk robotic guards of a major city, for instance, are straight out of HK-47's Guide To Politely Threatening Horrific Violence, and thus a very welcome change from the endless, endlessly earnest variations upon Basil Exposition. Infrequently, a sub-quest such as the haunted house offers more visual and atmospheric variety – and stuff you might actually remember a few weeks later – but it's all a bit lost in a flood of cod-fantasy blandness. There's clever writing hidden in there for sure, but for some reason it hasn't come to the fore. As for giving loot names such as ‘Stockings of Rage'-–well, the image of angry hosiery made me laugh, but I got the horrible sense that the game wasn't joking.

That said, it does find more boldness later on in the game, when it moves out of textbook forests and into slightly wilder environments, like cannon-besieged ice-lands and dwarven caverns filled with floating platforms and giant fans made from carved gemstones. The plot even starts to find its own voice and explore grey areas, though it takes for too long to get there and remains a far cry from Obsidian at their best storytelling. Stick with it and you will enjoy it more. It seems to find its feet eventually, but there are issues it never quite escapes.

DS3 even doesn't quite get loot right, despite including an amount of it perhaps best summarised as A Veritable Fuckton. While levelling up your skills is all big icons and easy percentages, loot quickly starts carrying additional, cryptic stats such as doom, momentum and chaos. Some are easy to figure out, but if you want to do the hard maths on what's better than what, you'll need to delve off to some forum or wiki. Is +4 momentum better than having +12 agility? Buggered if I know.

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Instead, I just equip whatever the game's said is worth the most money and sell the rest. Which is quick and effective enough, but between that and the very fixed nature of the class archetypes, I get no sense of building a specific type of character. Instead, I'm just making my little killing machine incrementally better at pretty much the rate the game dictates, and not really caring about what the magic hairclip (yep, really; yep, unironically) I've just equipped actually does. It doesn't feel like my game or my character-–just a fairly untaxing charge forward through a chain of death-corridors.

On PC, there's more wrong still. No support for 16:10 monitors (only console-friendly 16:9) means big black bars at the top of bottom of widescreen displays. This is rendered all the more unforgivable by the fact that it's the work of seconds to edit an .ini file yourself and force 16:10. Then there's the fact that you can't rebind keys, and that rolling the scrollwheel doesn't increase or decrease zoom, but instead flicks wildly between extreme close-up and not-quite-birds-eye-enough. Roll it up a millimetre and you'll zoom out; roll it up two millimetres and you're back on your character's shoulder.

It's pretty clear that PC version of the game got a little less tender loving care than its Stationed and Boxy cousins, and while patches have been promised that's not enough to battle upset that it was released with really bloody basic and obvious oversights. Even aside from this, I can see that DS3 would be far better suited to console than PC anyway–-it's button-mashy, it's pop, it's instant, it's got splitscreen co-op… These are worthy values, but they've resulted in a PC game that simply doesn't try to make its shadow any taller than its years-old rivals and predecessors. It's all too telling that it's a significantly more enjoyable, less fiddly play on gamepad than keyboard and mouse-–that way, the crazed camera actually makes sense.

(Speaking of co-op, remote multiplayer is perhaps one the game's major selling points. Unfortunately, the Steam-based review code I've been given has a slightly different name and appID to the release version, and thus can find no other people to play against. Gah! I could buy another version of the game to test the co-op properly, but based on my singleplayer experiencedo not feel it would be worthwhile. There's your full disclosure – if anyone reckons the co-op really does switch DS3 from ‘OK' to ‘gadzooks!' do say so below and I'll investigate.)

Of course, for all its shortcomings I played it for hours anyway, stayed up too late, got RSI, ate only chemically-flavoured snackfoods… That's how these things go, isn't it? It's a solid enough hack'n'slash game with varied environments and some inventive skills, and that certainly kept me playing – but when you can pick up something like Torchlight or Titan Quest for pennies (both of which are also far more attractive and characterful), it's really hard to recommend dropping £30-odd on this. If a patch that fixes up the PC control and display oversights and rethinks the presentation of stats does show up, I'll certainly feel a lot more fond of Dungeon Siege III. For now though: resume frustrated waiting for Diablo III.

Alec Meer is a writer for Rock Paper Shotgun, one of the world's best sites for PC gaming news. He enjoys robots, ladies and vegetables. Follow him on Twitter.

Republished with permission.

Kotaku

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Dungeon Siege 3 PC demo launched

2011年6月7日

If you're feeling overwhelmed by all the video game news spilling out of E3, perhaps you need to take a break and actually play a video game. Say, a demo for the PC edition of Obsidian's dungeon-crawling action-RPG Dungeon Siege III.

This dungeon is now besieged

As Dungeon Siege III is a Steamworks game on PC, you'll need to hit up Steam to download the demo. It's a 1.5GB download.

The Xbox 360 demo hit last week, but who can possibly grumble about a demo arriving before the game actually launches? What a novelty in this day and age. And for PC too, no less!

There's no word on the PlayStation 3 demo yet, which has doubtless been thrown off by the kerfuffle with the PlayStation Network. With PSN now back up and running, hopefully we can expect it soon.

Dungeon Siege III launches for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on June 21, published by Square Enix.

Shacknews

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Dungeon Siege 3 preview

2011年5月26日

Dungeon Siege 3 is getting ready to bring its monster-hacking loot fest to consoles and PC in less than a month. Though I'd gotten my hands on the first couple of hours back in February, I recently revisited a near-final version for the Xbox 360 to see how Obsidian's return to the kingdom of Ehb is shaping up.

Dungeon Siege 3

My earlier preview laid out the basic Dungeon Siege 3 design. It delivers solid, mission-based hack-and-slash gameplay, and rewards players with loot at every turn. In these respects, the game is very successful. In the first half-dozen hours of the campaign, I never felt as if I were fighting the same kind of enemy for too long, the environments (even the locations near the opening town) were visually varied, and I was popping into the menu every fifteen minutes or so to equip some better armor, weapons, and accessories.

Having already spent some time playing as Lucas (the warrior) and Anjali (the Archon), I began by trying out the characters I'd never seen before. Reinhart Manx is a mage that channels his power through an arcane gauntlet, and Katarina, who is a gun-wielding Lescanzi witch. Both are interesting additions to the playable roster, requiring slightly different play-styles. Katarina and Reinhart are much stronger at range, but do have serviceable close-range capabilities. As with the other characters, it's easy to see how some abilities might be more useful when combined during cooperative play, but I still found all of the characters to be perfectly capable choices for single-player adventuring.

I hold some misgivings about Dungeon Siege 3, however. During my first couple of hours, I found it incredibly difficult to get invested in the story. It's not that the dialog sequences, cinematics, and bits of text-based lore that you'll find aren't well written; they just seem a bit dry. Much of the information relayed (at least early-on) contains a wealth of detail about the world and its inhabitants, but, to me, much of it felt like exposition for its own sake. It got to the point where I became reluctant to ask characters for supplemental information, and found myself wanting to skip through the blocks of text that are presented when a new piece of lore is discovered.

Those already familiar with Dungeon Siege fiction may find it less of an issue, but I personally found that it took longer for me to get into the story than I'd have preferred. It's a little troubling, given the game's role-playing nature. That said, certain quests were more immediately engaging on an individual basis, like when I was asked to deliver a care package to a woman's husband, who I eventually found hanging upside down in a cave full of giant spiders. The dungeon for this sidequest was also unique, giving me the strong sense that even the game's optional missions aren't just throwaway quests.

Katarina and her 'boom stick.'

As the screenshots show, Dungeon Siege 3 looks quite good during its action and exploration segments; however the cinematic close-up dialog sequences betray some flat textures and lighting. Character models in these segments aren't very expressive and behave rather woodenly, ultimately giving the sense that they aren't meant to be viewed from up close. The visual disparities between cinematic dialog segments and the game's primary isometric third-person perspective can be jarring. The game will serve up beautiful battlefield vistas one moment, and homely-looking close-ups, the next.

Presentational quibbles aside, killing monsters, looting, and upgrading--Dungeon Siege 3's meat and potatoes--are all handled well, with responsive controls and a good number of unique spells and abilities to play with. I had something of a tough time getting into the story, but the minute-to-minute gameplay and some fun scenarios have been compelling enough to carry the experience so far, and keep me looking forward to the June 21 release on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

Shacknews

0

0

Dungeon Siege 3 preview

2011年5月26日

Dungeon Siege 3 is getting ready to bring its monster-hacking loot fest to consoles and PC in less than a month. Though I'd gotten my hands on the first couple of hours back in February, I recently revisited a near-final version for the Xbox 360 to see how Obsidian's return to the kingdom of Ehb is shaping up.

Dungeon Siege 3

My earlier preview laid out the basic Dungeon Siege 3 design. It delivers solid, mission-based hack-and-slash gameplay, and rewards players with loot at every turn. In these respects, the game is very successful. In the first half-dozen hours of the campaign, I never felt as if I were fighting the same kind of enemy for too long, the environments (even the locations near the opening town) were visually varied, and I was popping into the menu every fifteen minutes or so to equip some better armor, weapons, and accessories.

Having already spent some time playing as Lucas (the warrior) and Anjali (the Archon), I began by trying out the characters I'd never seen before. Reinhart Manx is a mage that channels his power through an arcane gauntlet, and Katarina, who is a gun-wielding Lescanzi witch. Both are interesting additions to the playable roster, requiring slightly different play-styles. Katarina and Reinhart are much stronger at range, but do have serviceable close-range capabilities. As with the other characters, it's easy to see how some abilities might be more useful when combined during cooperative play, but I still found all of the characters to be perfectly capable choices for single-player adventuring.

I hold some misgivings about Dungeon Siege 3, however. During my first couple of hours, I found it incredibly difficult to get invested in the story. It's not that the dialog sequences, cinematics, and bits of text-based lore that you'll find aren't well written; they just seem a bit dry. Much of the information relayed (at least early-on) contains a wealth of detail about the world and its inhabitants, but, to me, much of it felt like exposition for its own sake. It got to the point where I became reluctant to ask characters for supplemental information, and found myself wanting to skip through the blocks of text that are presented when a new piece of lore is discovered.

Those already familiar with Dungeon Siege fiction may find it less of an issue, but I personally found that it took longer for me to get into the story than I'd have preferred. It's a little troubling, given the game's role-playing nature. That said, certain quests were more immediately engaging on an individual basis, like when I was asked to deliver a care package to a woman's husband, who I eventually found hanging upside down in a cave full of giant spiders. The dungeon for this sidequest was also unique, giving me the strong sense that even the game's optional missions aren't just throwaway quests.

Katarina and her 'boom stick.'

As the screenshots show, Dungeon Siege 3 looks quite good during its action and exploration segments; however the cinematic close-up dialog sequences betray some flat textures and lighting. Character models in these segments aren't very expressive and behave rather woodenly, ultimately giving the sense that they aren't meant to be viewed from up close. The visual disparities between cinematic dialog segments and the game's primary isometric third-person perspective can be jarring. The game will serve up beautiful battlefield vistas one moment, and homely-looking close-ups, the next.

Presentational quibbles aside, killing monsters, looting, and upgrading--Dungeon Siege 3's meat and potatoes--are all handled well, with responsive controls and a good number of unique spells and abilities to play with. I had something of a tough time getting into the story, but the minute-to-minute gameplay and some fun scenarios have been compelling enough to carry the experience so far, and keep me looking forward to the June 21 release on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.